1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a customer-centric approach to interface design (C-CAID) such as for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems. The customer-centric approach to IVR menu design produces menu options that closely match the various tasks that customers are trying to accomplish when they are accessing an IVR system. The menu options are grouped and ordered by the frequency of the occurrence of specific customer's tasks, and they are worded in the language used by the customer to facilitate customer understanding of the actual choice provided.
2. Description of the Related Art
Every year, millions of customers call various customer service centers looking for assistance with various tasks that they want to accomplish or looking for answers to various inquiries. The end goal for both the customer and the customer service center is to route the customer's call to an organizational representative who can best accomplish the customer's task, while minimizing the number of misdirected calls. Presently, most customer calls are answered by an IVR whose primary function is to direct the call to an appropriate service center. To get a specific call to the correct center, the customers have to map or correlate their reason for calling onto the applicable IVR menu choices.
A major shortcoming of many of the present prior art interface design methods is that these methods simply map customer service departments onto an organizational hierarchy and allocate tasks to these departments based upon this organizational structure. Interface design is often accomplished with little or no empirical data or user centered methodology to guide the design process. If there is a department that handles new accounts, “New Accounts” becomes a menu option and incoming calls are routed to that department. The remaining services provided by the various organizational service centers are allocated accordingly. The interface design is forcibly fit onto the existing organizational structure.
Another shortcoming of this approach is that many of the organizational structure names do not translate easily into language constructs that a user would readily understand. For example, a service organization entitled “High Speed Internet Access Modalities” when converted into a menu option would not convey the same information content to the average user as “Ordering a new ISDN Line”.
The underlying problem common to all of the prior art systems is that there is no user data or user information input into systems development in the early design stages. The resulting user interface merely mirrors an organization and there is no customization or optimization folded into the design of the interface. The resulting menu is simply imposed on the user with no consideration or forethought for what are the actual requirements of the user or how to best address the needs of the user.
The goal of an effective interface design methodology is to use as much user input as possible to ensure that users are presented with choices that they need and are able to understand, while simultaneously minimizing and potentially eliminating unproductive time spent looking at and having to choose between selections that do not address or solve the specific problems that customers want solved or addressed. The choice of style, type, structure and language used in the interface design all have a significant impact upon performance.
In contrast to traditional methods of interface design, the current methodology takes into consideration end-user task frequency and applies the language of the user in the design of the interface menu options. It is much easier for a user to understand and make an intelligent and informed selection of a requested service or task in their own words and in the language of more common usage, rather than listening to recitations of technical jargon and organization-specific descriptions. In a conventional system, a user may have to hazard a guess (with the resulting possibility of an incorrect guess) as to which category applies to their particular situation. Such guessing is minimized by the present interface design method.
Therefore, a method is needed to design an interface that maximizes the performance of the users during operation, reduces misrouted calls, and ensures that the users arrive at their desired destination after successfully (i.e., rapidly and directly) navigating through the menuing system. The present customer centric design methodology has been shown to improve system performance by mapping the user's task representations to the task options of the user interface. The C-CAID approach allows customers to make the correct menu option selection and reach the correct service department without requiring additional assistance or intervention from an operator or customer service representative.
Following the C-CAID approach results in a user interface that the customer can easily understand and successfully navigate. In other words, the interface according to the present invention is designed to be customer friendly. This increases system performance, reduces operational costs, improves customer satisfaction, and leads to general improvements in overall efficiency.